Technologies

What Our Customers Are Saying

From day one, Reverse Polarity LLC has been an amazing and truly reliable technology resource, for a variety of projects we have engaged in here at First Manhattan Consulting Group.

The services they provide are invaluable with regards to the critical deadlines that we face in the very fast paced and extremely competitive business of financial consulting.

In addition to their innovation, creativity and technical knowledge of network infrastructure, security, systems integration and Open Source solutions they are fast to respond and provide the quickest possible turnaround time.

Here in NYC we have an overwhelming choice of technology vendors to choose from, however we have found Reverse Polarity to be the most reliable, professional and trustworthy choice and consider them as part of our IT team. I highly recommend them and will gladly continue to do business with them.

Because we believe that privacy and anononimity on the Internet are both very important, on January 1st, 2015 we set up a Tor Relay.

Tor stands for "The Onion Router".

If you are unfamiliar with Tor, please check out their website to learn more about who uses Tor and why it is so important now that many of the details of the NSA's illegal tracking and logging of all Internet communications have been revealed.

Not only are foreign communications being tracked and logged - ALL communications are. This means emails, web browsing, SMS text messages, instant messages, Skype and on and on, and it means all of your activity is being illegally tracked and logged.

As this new years begins we are making it a point to lend a hand to the Tor Project by running this anonymizing relay service.

I thought it would be a good idea to monitor some basic stats from the Samba servers that we manage and maintain. It would be nice, for example, to know the total number of users in the domain (LDAP, or tbd), the total number of machines in the domain, the number of currently connected users, the number of currently opened shares, and total number of open files.

Of course, if we have all of this information, we are going to graph it too!

Below is a short Xymon external script (bash shell script) which gathers this information using pdbedit, smbldap-userlist, and smbstatus and reports the information back to the Xymon server.

"Shellshock is rated as 10 out of 10 or the highest possible severity rating by the United States National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Furthermore, NVD rated Shellshock as a 10 on the scale when it comes to both impact and exploitability."

At Reverse Polarity, we offer our clients the piece of mind that comes with knowing that their servers and systems are secure from vulnerabilities and are patched against new ones as soon as they are announced.

We were notified of this "Shellshock" vulnerability in the bash shell late this afternoon, and within less than two hours (not days, not weeks, not months...), all of our customers with servers under maintenance contracts were updated and patched against this major security vulnerability.

There is (at the time of this posting) an interesting, and on-going conversation on Twitter under the hashtag #shellshock.